I saved some scanners from the trash bin at work last friday so I decided to make a laser projector... I had been thinking about building one, and had been snooping around PL for a couple weeks. BTW, thank you all for the amount of information floating around this place!
I was very impatient over the weekend and found LaserBoy to be quite interesting. I emailed and talked to James, who was extremely helpful. Amazingly, I ended up finding everything I needed for this project at RadioShack and Circuit City. I ended up buying a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy, which was really easy to modify. It had large contacts where I needed to solder. You can see in the pictures below.
Without the breadboard and the wiring which I already had, the whole controller only set me back about $50.
SUCCESS!!!!!! But, still waiting on a green laser with TTL coming in the mail.
External electronics for setting commmand offset and gain, soon will be soldered to a board
Sound card modication. I had to wire all 8 channels in order to figure out which one was which. I'm only running one laser for now, so all I needed was three channels. I also ened up powering the external electronics off the PCI +/-12V by soldering to a few pins on the sound card.
Barold